Darren YeoFollowUX Collective--1ListenShareYou are forgiven if you are unfamiliar with the name Charles Sirató. Born in 1905, Sirató was an obscure Hungarian poet who produced no more than 15 bodies of literature. He passed away in 1980, partly due to his ill health. At one point, his piece of work was almost lost and forgotten. World War II and the Cold War stopped him from returning to Paris. The world may have never heard of the Dimensionism movement if no one had taken notice of his unpublished copy, which attracted the biggest names of 20th-century art, such as Joan Miro, Hans Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Alexander Calder, and Bauhaus Designer László Moholy-Nagy.Dimensionism was an artistic response to the significant scientific achievements of the 1930s. Among inventions and new discoveries, Einstein’s theory of relativity was by far the most captivating, leading Sirató to conceptualize his theory of space and time. It was a celebration of the arts and sciences that spurred further inspiration, imagination, and innovation.“We must accept — contrary to the classical conception — that Space and Time are no longer separate categories, but rather that they are related dimensions in the sense of the non-Euclidean conception, and thus all the old limits and boundaries of the arts d i s a p p e a r,” Sirató wrote. “This new ideology has elicited a veritable earthquake and subsequent landslide in the conventional artistic system.”The formula “N+1”, proposes that the artist attempts to transcend from one given dimension to the next. Poets stitched their verses together to form graphical shapes. Painters attempted to push the limits of their two-dimensional canvases, and sculptors gave movement to their art forms. And what comes after the fourth dimension? According to Sirató, he referred to this as the “cosmic arts”, which represented other pioneering scientific discoveries in the fields of mathematics, molecular sciences, and quantum physics.The beauty of the Dimensionist Manifesto is its acceptance that both the arts and science can coexist. And despite the fact that the outcomes of dimensionism are more artistic in nature, they have the potential to break out of their preconceived notions. Because words do not necessarily have to be written in straight lines, just like sculpture may not need to have permanence, Sirató ends the manifesto with the following words, “Deductive with respect to the past. Inductive with respect to the future. Alive in the present.”The temporality of time brings us closer to the present, from a hundred years to a few minutes of reading this article. In 2018, curator Vanja Malloy organized an exhibition titled “Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein" to commemorate Charles Sirató with a selection of over 70 pieces of work. Her choice of location at the University of California, Berkeley, was deliberately near Silicon Valley’s tech startups in hopes of having more cross-disciplinary conversations.Artificial intelligenceIndeed, digital is the next frontier of dimensionism. It is the ideal medium to express forms across all dimensions, ranging from code (1D) to vector (2D), CAD (3D), and animation (4D). But it wasn’t until December 2015, when Sam Altman and his collaborators created OpenAI, and much later, GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, did we see the resemblance of dimensionism’s “N+1” taking place. Suddenly, prompts, in the form of words, produce 2D images. And images push the boundaries to create videos with artificial intelligence. We are now living in a new age of AI, and we can use the same concepts of dimensionism. The only difference is that, rather than limiting itself to a few renowned artists, anyone can apply Dimensionism with the right tools. It is a new way of thinking in dimensions.Building Information Modelling (BIM)Dimensional thinking is not limited to artificial intelligence alone. Just as Sirató’s manifesto gave other types of transitional art forms at different dimensions, so too are other forms of design and their digital medium. An interface often not talked about is the 3D model software, such as Trimble’s SketchUp and McNeel’s Rhinoceros 3D. The representation of 3D models, guided by different views, may be an odd experience for most users and UX designers. Yet, it is uniquely strange and familiar to engineers, architects, and industrial designers. Create a fly-through animation, and you enter a temporal scene of various 3D models.But there’s more because there is a newer tool for builders. Also known as building information modeling, or BIM, designs can now store and manage valuable information in digital representations of built assets. For example, a 3D model of a door could now have physical and functional data embedded in it. It is therefore no coincidence that the concept of dimensions beyond 3D is conceptualized in BIM. In the fifth dimension, cost and time schedules can be incorporated into 3D models. In the sixth dimension, life cycle management and sustainability data can be captured at different scales.Imagine applying dimensional thinking to digital experiences so that we consider performance and sustainability as dimensions of our interfaces. Kris De Decker was not too far off with his Low-Tech Magazine. His idea: to make his website solar-powered and self-hosted, such that at times, the site will go offline. At the bottom of his site lie live statistics on the weather forecast, battery status, and power consumption. From this example, we can anticipate how much more consumption each additional element would require in order to publish a new article on his website. How might we supply relevant information to the components of our digital interfaces as a new dimensional layer for a more sustainable world?Spatial computingAnd then there’s spatial computing, the latest sensation from Apple. N+1 is evident in the blending of physical space and digital interfacing. And although WWDC 2023 mostly showed flat 2D screens juxtaposed across different planes in space, we are left to imagine what other dimensional experiences there could be. Again, wearing the dimensional thinking hat (or headset), we could conceptualize an immersive movie done in an agora style in the comfort of the home or a cabin seat on the plane. Could movie directors capture film with high-spec 360 cameras? What about watching the weather forecast across a miniaturized landscape? And lastly, what if we could build models with a more naturalistic interface, such as with space itself? We have seen Swift and ARKit for Apple developers. Having a 3D modeling software kit for designers is highly feasible, with the potential to disrupt the incumbents — Autodesk, Trimble, and other engineering software.Because, let’s face it, builders and designers love to interact with their own designs. They love to inspect the detailing of their works, but not on a flat, cold, distant interface from a desktop screen. The job to be done is digital sculpting. For designers, it is to recreate new sculptural experiences in digital spaces merged with physical realities. For people, it is to experience a new curation of the world.I had postulated in a previous article that Design 4.0 is a blend of Industry 4.0 and new technological achievements for designers. The path to becoming transdisciplinary is in front of us by adopting an x-shaped design mindset by combining our core skills with new complementary skills. Perhaps dimensional thinking helps us take one step further in this new journey. There are three ways to start with dimensional thinking:1. Ask yourself what is holding you back as a designerAre there pre-existing beliefs that prevent you from taking a step out to acquire new skills? Some of the beliefs say that you are already a good product designer. If so, then expanding our vocabulary of what “products” could mean helps us understand new paradigms and how we can navigate them. There was once a viewpoint that the product designer makes practical and appealing physical objects. Thus, the term product designer in the digital context is a piggyback term derived from its predecessor. We no longer need to isolate the two designers. They can now be the same.2. Blend your skills with the new N+1 dimensionsWe need a whole new category of designers with similar lineages. The pioneers, such as artists, will inspire the communities. The innovators will build new models. Our role as design innovators is to unlearn what we already know, and relearn what we understood before. Because the goal is to invest resources to craft new design standards and processes in spatial computing, as well as new experiences to live and work in. Apple’s VisionOS is the obvious candidate, with resources made available to developers and designers. As an experience designer between the two realities of 3D modeling and UX/UI, I am at the vantage point of witnessing a transformation where the 3D models will interact organically in a generative space where their embedded meta-data can be retrieved by the responsible parties. The prospects are exciting, but we need the next group of designers to create the new realities.3. Assemble the united collectiveIt would be hilarious not to acknowledge the power of a collective (if you have any objections, refer back to the history of UX Collective), but it is also important to understand the deeper discussions around it. One source of collective comes from the Actor Network Theory (ANT) by Bruno Latour. Roberto Verganti offers a more design-centric approach in his book, "Design-Driven Innovation”.The premise is similar: we need human or non-human actors or interpreters to establish new, consistent meaning. It is a system that always performs, always checks, and calibrates the boundaries. Often, this requires seeing out these agents, who tend to be forward-looking and who are developing, often for their own purposes, unique visions about how meanings could evolve in the life context we want to investigate. Observe how Apple reached out to musicians, artists, and designers to work on their new products. Our protagonist, Charles Sirató, did the same by assembling his group of artists and designers. We can do the same, and we can do so with a level of heterogeneity, such that we have technologists, cultural actors, and business folks among the collective.Dimensional thinking is very much alive, as it was about a hundred years ago. We have to thank the great minds who preserved its ideals, from Charles Sirató and his Dimensionism manifesto to Vanja Malloy’s attempt to introduce Dimensionism to the tech world with her exhibition. The last words left by Sirató are rather fitting. It is his call to action:We invite all the [actors], in accord with our ideas expressed in the manifesto, to collaborate with us.That they join us, that they send us photos of theirs works, which we would be able to publish in our journal.That they participate in our exhibition. That they propagate — outside of our international organization — our manifestos, our ideas, our works.Let’s aspire for our works to be timeless.Further readings:Apple. “Learn — VisionOS.” Apple Developer, 2023, developer.apple.com/visionos/learn/. Accessed 17 June 2023.Decker, Kris. “LOW←TECH MAGAZINE.” LOW←TECH MAGAZINE, 2018, solar.lowtechmagazine.com/.Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press, 2007.McGivern, Hannah. “When the Avant-Garde Met E=Mc2: The Story behind Dimensionism.” The Art Newspaper — International Art News and Events, 7 Nov. 2018, www.theartnewspaper.com/2018/11/07/when-the-avant-garde-met-emc2-the-story-behind-dimensionism. Accessed 17 June 2023.Quito, Anne. “An Eye-Opening Exhibition Shows How Scientific Breakthroughs Shaped Modern Art.” Quartz, 28 Nov. 2018, qz.com/quartzy/1476253/dimensionism-defined-how-science-shaped-modern-art. Accessed 17 June 2023.Sirató, Károly. A Dimenzionista Manifesztum Története. Artpool, 2010.Stenzel, Maria. “Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein | Amherst in Pictures | Amherst College.” Www.amherst.edu, www.amherst.edu/news/amherst-in-pictures/dimensionism-modern-art-in-the-age-of-einstein. Accessed 19 June 2023.Verganti, Roberto . Design-Driven Innovation : Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean. Boston, Ma, Harvard Business Press, Cop, 2009.----1UX CollectiveRethinking Design. Redesigning Thinking. Living, Breathing Experience.HelpStatusWritersBlogCareersPrivacyTermsAboutText to speechTeams